• Telco 2.0™ Research & Analysis
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• Telco 2.0™ Consulting

Why does it exist?

• Overall Strategy: How is the digital economy evolving, what are the best strategic responses and the most profitable market opportunities?
• Voice and Messaging: How best to innovate core service offerings to add value and grow revenues?
• Data and Broadband: How to ensure incentives and rewards are better aligned across the [digital content] value chain?
• New Communications Services: How can latent telecoms capabilities be better exploited to address new market opportunities?

Conventional Answers are Unsatisfactory

Challenges to the Telecoms Industry

• The vertically integrated Telecoms business model is under attack from all sides: tougher regulation, new technology (most notably VoIP and open spectrum), disintermediatory new entrants, and advancing customer expectations.
• P/E ratios suggest little investor belief in this improving. They have low confidence in 'converged' or triple/quadruple-play bundles providing high returns.
• Operators are making investment decisions in Network & IT, Products & Services, and Mergers & Acquisitions without a clear view of the future.
• 92% of respondents to an STL online survey replied that 're-thinking the strategic role of the operator' is a key priority.
• 85% of senior execs said the current telco business model will no longer deliver sufficient growth. (Telco 2.0 Survey, November 2008)
• There is an urgent need for all players in the telecoms value chain to review and renew their business models.

The Opportunity

Telco 2.0™ 'two-sided' telecoms business model

How to get involved?

• To start to explore the opportunities in more depth see our reports or attend one of our Executive Brainstorm events
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  (email: contact@telco2.net)
• To explore the strategies appropriate to your organisation arising from these developments use our consulting services
• We also use our insights, contacts and experience to help clients evaluate and implement innovative strategies and applications, and to create new business opportunities - email contact@telco2.net
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• For more detail, please see the full Telco 2.0™ Manifesto

Telco 2.0: The Future Of Telecoms

Telecoms: Will they be the owners of all future content distribution channels?

"Traditionally, telecom companies simply offered various types of phone services and connectivity, and moved lots of data around - maintaining and constantly improving pipes & networks was the primary mission."

Photo credit: Ann Triling
Today, the basic connectivity offerings have become seriously commoditized: prices are dropping towards zero in a ‘feels like free’ way, and due to the ever-increasing P2Paction the comfortable old position of being a ‘dump pipe’ is no longer a viable option,no matter which way you look at it.
The bottom line is that there is no way that Content and Services will not end up packaged into those expensive pipes, cables and wireless networks.
But take note of those keywords: PACKAGED and BUNDLED and Feels Like Free.

The Future of Telecoms

by Gerd Leonhard

Increasingly, the Future of Telecoms is more in the com than in the tele; in facilitating communications based on, around and ‘lubricated’ with Content and Services.
Voice traffic will only be a small and probably diminishing slice of the pie here - similar to how CDs and digital music ‘unit sales’ will make up only a fraction of the future revenues of record labels.
In a networked ecosystem that wants to serve and empower those pesky ‘always-on’ digital natives, telcos and operators have no choice but to branch out into adjacent or even completely alien sectors - if they don’t, other players such as device & handset manufacturers, web portals, social networks and search engines will feel compelled to fill the gaps and push the pipe & network guys further and further down to the bottom of a digital ecosystem that has only just now begun to flourish (remember: only about 2% of the world is on broadband, today - there is a long way to go, yet). Imagine a Facebook Mobile Network, a Samsung Mobile Video Platform, and (of course) a Google eBook Reader?

Content Re-Defined

Clearly, those Web0.0 ‘dumb pipes & walled garden’ concepts are dead and gone - now it is all about what comes through those pipes, not where they come from.
And crucially, content must now be defined in a much broader way: not just as a piece of ‘professionally made’ and bona-fide copyrightable work that is being transmitted but also inclusive of all the surrounding user interactions, attention kernels and clickstreams (oooopps... sorry for the geek speak).
Context becomes very valuable Content, too.
TwitterMusic, Google VidRead, Gone.MTV, Skype.TV, MotoTube…

Media 2.0

For telcos, it’s about time to get into a new game, and it’s called Media2.0 - a vast and mind-boggling opportunity for (pro)aggressive networks to literally leapfrog over some of those incumbent and still future-shocked media companies, giving birth to or simply fueling new disruptors that could very well be the next Viacom, CBS, BBC or Warner Music. Deutsche Telekom, Orange or Telefonica should have boughtLast.fm, not CBS!
Now, witness Nokia packaging UMG’s and SonyBMG’s music into their handsets, and sell it together.
Witness Google trying to package ‘free music’ into their Top100.cn search engine in China; witness CBS’s Last.fm API’ing ‘free interactive, on-demand music’ into social networks.
Services such as Last.FM, Pandora, Flickrand Twitter (and there are many others) already make heavy use the telco’s networks to ship and distribute data at an ever increasing pace and volume.

Now, many telecoms and network operators around the world are starting to realize where their future is taking them: Content +ConText+Communications+Services+ Ads2.0.
So let’s plot a few futuristic scenarios:
 Twitter may just start to provide pre-loaded content-’links’; users would be able to receive messages with a hot medialink to a file that is pre-loaded somewhere, and instantly stream it via any flash-enabled mobile device. MicroMedia anyone?
A telco (Verizon? SingTel? TMobile?) will buy whatever is left of SonyBMG when Bertelsmann finally drops out of the joint venture; and SK Telecom may well end up buying a majority stake in Warner Music, globally (they do already own 50% of their Korean JV with WMG).
My take is that Music2.0 is likely to coincide with Telco2.0 if the large (but quickly shrinking) music conglomerates and the forever-at-snail-pace music rights organizations keep on playing hard-to get with anyone that has the audacity to want to actually use their music legally.
China Mobile will start ChinaSpace, a social network build around content that is generated entirely by the users (or shall we say Usators).

The New Music Business

Within 18-24 months, a major telecom (Vodafone? Telefonica? NTT?) will announce that they are entering the music business. They will start from scratch, unencumbered with back-catalog, contracts and Music1.0 (;) people and concerns, working with new artists and with those well-known brand name acts that have finally left their labels for good, riffing off the various Music2.0 blue-prints that have been making their way around the Net (including my own humble Music2.0 book I hope;).
This will be fueled by the fact many incumbent record labels (no, not just the major labels and the RIAA) have famously succeeded in being ubiquitously hated by the music fans i.e. the users, their artists, the general public, and - you guessed it - the telecom execs, themselves. Ten years of back-patting and spending 100s of Millions of $ to convince these guys to somehow give the consumers what they really want - no wonder there is serious thirst for revenge here.
Telcos are fed up and will cut their slavish ties to the old major label system in the next 9-18 months.
Flat-rate music offerings will become a standard - and fuel the telcos of tomorrow.
Smarter toll-booths for more traffic.

Other Likely Scenarios

Skype will be sold by eBay to either a major social network (F….k?) or a major telecom, and will come back full circle to how it got started: a powerful network for sharing data the cheapest possible way, be it phone calls or other bits and bytes i.e. content (read: music, film, TV, books...). Skype is where legal P2P will happen, first.
Within 12-18 months, together with Google, one of the leading advertising and communication agencies will strike a deal with a major telco and jointly launch ad-supported and user-generated content services based on an  Advertising2.0approach, completely side-stepping traditional content production and licensing procedures and offering new artists (and out-of-contract acts) yet another way to go direct.

Recommendations for Telcos

So, dear Telcos, Operators and ISPs, here are my 2 cents:

1. Stop worrying about pleasing the incumbent music & media industry players and ‘the studios’- either they will follow your lead and give five billion users what they want, how they want it, or you need to leave them behind as quickly as possible.
2. Play your hand now for it is strong: you have the network, you have the users, you have the billing relationships - you can get the content the way you need it, too!
3. Like the Radio and Broadcasting Industries before you, start by demanding a new, standardized blanket license for full-length, interactive music streaming followed by unlimited downloading of music on digital networks; and while this is being negotiated start making deals with Ad Agencies and Advertisers to prep the Advertising2.0 pipeline.
4. It’s music first and then Film, Video, TV…. $700 Billion of Advertising per year are ready to be traded in this battle for content in return for attention. Seize the day.

More Info

Some sources of inspiration for this Future Story:
IBM Future of Advertising Report
Telco2.0 Two-sided business model
Telco2.0 Blog
Edelmann Trust Report



Originally written by Gerd Leonhard for MediaFuturist and first published on 20th May 2008 as " The Future of Telcos" (PDF)


Gerd Leonhard is a media futurist as well as an author and writer, a media and Internet entrepreneur, a strategic advisor, and a keynote speaker & presenter.

If you want to get a good feel for what he does, you can check out Gerd's blog MediaFuturist, or watch some videos from the new Media Conversations Future Talksseries (to select an episode just click on the book icon / guide button, and go from there). You can also visit  his Youtube channel, or subscribe to his video feed.



Photocredits
The Future of Telcos - Content & Service Pipes: Yin Chern Ng
The Future of Telecoms: Tomasz Trojanowski
Content Re-Defined: Kin Hang Norman Chan
Media 2.0: Goran Stojanovic
The New Music Business: Arnlod Turner
Other Likely Scenarios: Hypermania
Recommendations: Yuri Arcurs
Gerd Leonhard -
Reference: MediaFuturist [  Read more ]

Kejaksaan AS mendakwa tujuh orang pelaku kejahatan dunia maya yang telah membobol jutaan situs internet di seluruh dunia untuk kegiatan kriminal.

Dakwaan yang dibacakan di New York, Rabu (9/11) waktu setempat itu, menyebutkan keuntungan yang diraup para pelaku mencapai sedikitnya $14 juta.

Dari tujuh tersangka, satu orang Rusia masih dinyatakan buron, sementara enam orang lainnya merupakan warga Estonia yang segera diekstradisi.

Mereka didakwa melakukan penipuan dengan cara membuat perusahaan palsu yang diiklankan di sebuah situs internet.

"Tanpa pengetahuan atau izin pengguna komputer, terdakwa membobolnya untuk kegiatan penipuan mereka," kata jaksa dalam dakwaannya.

Dari situs resmi milik perusahaan orang lain itu, para peretas (hacker) ini kemudian melakukan penipuan, dengan membobol sekitar empat juta situs internet di lebih dari 100 negara.

Dalam surat dakwaan itu terungkap ada 500.000 situs internet di AS yang berhasil dibobol oleh para terdakwa, termasuk beberapa diantaranya milik lembaga pendidikan, kelompok nirlaba dan lembaga pemerintah seperti NASA.

September 15 2011

Kementerian Komunikasi dan Informatika (Kemenkominfo) akhirnya menyerah dengan pilihan teknologi yang digunakan untuk spektrum 2,3 GHz, khususnya yang akan digunakan oleh operator  pemenang tender broadband wireless access (BWA) tiga tahun lalu.

Jika sebelumnya,  Kemenkominfo lebih memilih standar  IEEE 802.16d-2004 untuk Fixed atau Nomadic Wimax dengan  teknik modulasi  Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) yang lebih dikenal dengan standar 16d.
Maka sekarang para pemenang tender dibebaskan memilih teknologi yang akan digunakan bisa standar 16d,  IEEE 802.16e-2005  untuk Mobile Wimax dengan teknik modulasi Spatial Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Access (SOFDMA) atau 16e, mobile wimax, bahkan Time Duplex  Long Term Evolution (TD-LTE) sekalipun.

“Kami mencoba realistis dengan kondisi yang ada. Kita tidak bisa memasung pilihan teknologi yang akan digunakan. Jika terpasung dengan satu teknologi, kita khawatir tingkat penetrasi broadband di Indonesia tidak akan maju-maju,” ungkap  Direktur Jenderal Sumber Daya Perangkat Pos dan Informatika Kemenkominfo Muhammad Budi Setyawan di Jakarta, belum lama ini.
Diungkapkannya, perubahan kebijakan itu akan dituangkan dalam  peraturan pejabat direktur jenderal. “Kami telah berkonsultasi dengan Lembaga Kebijakan Pengadaan Barang dan Jasa Kementerian Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional. Hasilnya, kebijakan menggunakan teknologi netral ini tidak berdampak hukum terhadap hasil tender pada 2009. Tidak ada post bidding,” katanya.

Anggota Komite Badan Regulasi Telekomunikasi Indonesia (BRTI) Nonot Harsono menambahkan, penerapan teknologi netral untuk sementara berlaku untuk alokasi di 2,3GHz dengan rentang 2360-2390 atau sebesar 30 MHz.
Menurut Nonot, penggunaan teknologi netral merujuk pada Undang-Undang No 17 Tahun 2007 tentang Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Panjang Nasional Tahun 2005-2025. Dalam penjelasan poin D No 31, pemerintah mengarahkan pembangunan pos dan telematika menuju konvergensi dengan menerapkan teknologi netral yang responsif terhadap kebutuhan pasar dan industri.
“Teknologi yang terbuka akan menciptakan persaingan yang sehat antarpemain, dan menciptakan lapangan pekerjaan baru bagi sumber daya lokal. Siklus perkembangan teknologi yang cepat juga harus diimbangi dengan regulasi yang mendukung,” ujarnya.

Dijelaskannya, syarat bagi operator pemenang tender BWA memilih teknologi netral harus bisa berinterperobility dan rela merogoh kocek untuk membayar price cap yang nantinya akan diumumkan pemerintah.  Penentuan price cap akan dilakukan melalui konsultasi publik.
”Kita akan diskusi dengan lembaga terkait untuk menentukan price cap jika operator ada yang memilih teknologi netral. Harus diketahui, sejak dulu para KRT di BRTI mendorong dipakainya teknologi netral,” katanya.
Ditegaskannya, walau memilih teknologi netral, namun regulator tidak akan menyampingkan masalah penyerapan komponen lokal yang dikenal dengan Tingkat Kandungan Dalam Negeri (TKDN) dari sisi penggunaan perangkat nantinya.

Diungkapkannya, dari diskusi yang ada terkait TKDN, pemerintah menimbang menggunakan standar di 16d dimana pemenang tender wajib  memenuhi sebesar 30 persen bagi  subscriber station (CPE) dan 40 persen untuk base station TKDN dalam proyek BWA. Selain itu  juga diwajibkan meningkatkan penggunaan produksi perangkat telekomunikasi lokal hingga 50 persen dalam jangka waktu 5 tahun.

Untuk diketahui, sejak pengumuman tender pada 2009, layanan BWA dengan teknologi WiMAX 16d belum  dikomersialisasikan oleh para pemenang tender walau kewajiban membayar up front fee dan Biaya Hak Penggunaan (BHP) frekuensi dipenuhi.
Alasannya, pilihan teknologi yang ditetapkan oleh pemerintah tidak memenuhi skala ekonomis sehingga menyulitkan para operator. Padahal, berdasarkan dokumen tender, perusahaan pemenang tender harus melakukan komersialisasi layanan pada November 2010, yang bisa diperpanjang selama satu tahun hingga November 2011.

Berdasarkan hasil tender 2009, pemerintah menetapkan delapan perusahaan sebagai pemenang tender lisensi BWA. Tiga perusahaan kehilangan lisensi, karena tidak mampu membayar biaya up front fee dan BHP frekuensi tahun pertama senilai  70 miliar rupiah.
Saat ini tersisa lima perusahaan pemegang lisensi BWA, yakni PT Berca Hardayaperkasa, PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk (Telkom), PT First Media (First Media), PT Indosat Mega Media (IM2), dan PT Jasnita Telekomindo. Masing-masing perusahaan mendapat kapasitas sebesar 30 MHz di setiap zona lisensi.

Sambut Gembira
Chairman Berca Group Murdaya Widyawimarta Poo menyambut gembira langkah dari pemerintah tersebut. ”Kami siap memenuhi keinginan pemerintah, baik soal harus adanya price cap atau TKDN,” katanya.
Diungkapkannya, perusahaan telah menyiapkan investasi hingga  500 juta dollar AS untuk memasarkan layanan WiMax dengan merek Wigo di Pulau Sumatera, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, dan Bali-Nusa Tenggara dengan pengadaan perangkat dari Xirka dan Panggung Electric Citrabuana.

Menurut Direktur IM2 Indar Atmanto kebijakan teknologi netral dalam pemanfaatan spektrum yang terbatas   akan mampu meningkatkan posisi tawar Indonesia dalam memanfaatkan teknologi.
Namun, ketika ditanya kesediaan membayar price cap, Indar menjawab secara diplomatis. ”Semua faktor akan menjadi pertimbangan   termasuk ketentuan-ketentuan terkini yang berlaku. Dalam men-deploy layanan BWA kita selalu memastikan bahwa layanan yang akan dipasarkan dapat dinikmati masyarakat dengan harga yang terjangkau,” katanya.

Sementara Head Of Corporate Communication Affair Telkom Eddy Kurnia menolak keras rencana pemerintah tersebut karena bertentangan dengan hasil tender. “Kami menolak rencana pemerintah ini. Ini namanya memberikan ketidakpastian bagi berinvestasi. Jika dari awal ditetapkan teknologi netral, tentunya Telkom dalam ikut tender tiga tahun lalu strateginya tidak seperti kemarin,” ketusnya.

Secara terpisah, Praktisi telematika Hermanuddin menyarankan jika pemerintah konsisten ingin mengembangkan BWA, seharusnya tidak perlu lagi ada price cap karena sudah dibayar oleh pemenang tender kala lelang beberapa tahun lalu.
“Frekuensinya sudah ditetapkan fleksibel mau digunakan untuk teknologi apa saja. Sekarang harusnya bergantung kepada pengguna melihat mana yang lebih efisien dan ekonomis,” katanya.[dni]
Agustus 4, 2011 (Sumber: Doni Ismanto http://doniismanto.wordpress.com)